The changes in IT brought on by the adoption of artificial intelligence have led Dell Technologies Inc. and other key tech industry players to reshape their offerings for the modern, scalable data center. This shift has required advances in energy efficiency, operational simplicity and cyber resilience to meet customer expectations for future-ready, AI-equipped infrastructure.

“We’ve been talking to customers around the world the past couple of years, and if there’s one tone or one piece of feedback that is predominant across all areas it’s really how to transform the data center and prepare for the next wave of computing,” said David Schmidt (pictured), senior director, PowerEdge Product Management, at Dell Technologies. “That next wave has to incorporate AI workloads; it has to refresh the existing workloads that run a customer’s business and figure out how all of that gets incorporated together.”

Dell’s David Schmidt talks with theCUBE about Dell’s focus on building a scalable data center to meet current and future AI needs.

Schmidt spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at the “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed key elements of Dell’s focus on building a scalable data center to meet current and future AI needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Building a scalable data center through smart systems management

Figuring out how the pieces are incorporated together involves understanding how they are performing at any given time, according to Schmidt. One of the ways that Dell provides this capability is through OpenManage, a suite of systems management tools designed to help IT staff monitor and deploy Dell servers and related infrastructure.

“If you asked folks a couple of years ago how much power they were getting in their rack, maybe you get an answer four times out of ten,” Schmidt said. “Now, if I’m asking a customer how much power they have for their rack, it’s ten times out of ten, they know exactly how much power. They need the ability to measure it and everything that’s influencing consumption of power. That’s what we’re focused on providing through OpenManage.”

Along with knowing how much power is being allocated, customers also want a clear understanding of how much systems security they have, according to Schmidt. This has become a more significant factor as some enterprise firms either ban the use of AI outright or require training programs before workloads can go into production in order to mitigate security concerns.

“The conversations with our customers have never been more centered around security than they are today,” Schmidt said. “It starts with what we build inside of our platforms with PowerEdge and our systems management, our [Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller] inside the server and our hardware root of trust. From there, you can walk that into a variety of security options, and that’s just going to continue to grow as we move forward through the rest of the year and into the next five years.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and Intel Corp., the sponsors of this part of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE